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Nationwide

Coffee distributors in the US

In almost every other food category the manufacturer and the distributor are different companies, and knowing which one you are talking to is half the battle. Coffee is the exception: the company that roasts your beans is usually the same company that invoices and delivers them. This page sets the suppliers we have verified against that, and against a supply chain that begins entirely outside the United States.

  • Every supplier here was verified against the company's own website when its metro page was built, and each row links to that full listing.
  • The import, exchange and price figures below come from USDA's Economic Research Service, the Intercontinental Exchange, the International Coffee Organization and the Federal Register, each dated.
  • Seven metros in six states. No paid placements, no rankings, and no price comparison: we hold no price data and will not invent any.
Browse all 110 suppliers

At a glance

Suppliers verified
110
Across 7 researched metros
Ship beyond their metro
86
Say so on their own site
Independent houses
107
Local specialists and regional distributors
Deliver to you
75
Within the areas they publish
Walk-in options
31
Collect without a delivery minimum
Publish a delivery area
28
The rest say nothing about how far they go

Every coffee supplier we have verified, in one list

Filter by metro, by how the business is set up, and by how you can buy. Each row says what the company sells beyond the beans, because in this trade the equipment, the training and the service contract are usually what makes a supplier hard to leave.

City

Supplier type

How you buy

Showing 110 of 110 suppliers.

The company that roasts your coffee is usually the company that invoices you

Every other category page on this site spends some of its length explaining the difference between the business that makes the food and the business that delivers it. On the meat page they are almost never the same company and the page exists partly to say so. Coffee inverts that, and it changes what shopping for a supplier means.

The trade's own body publishes the taxonomy that shows it. The National Coffee Association's business directory lets a member declare any of about forty-two business types, and among its 174 members, 62 declare Coffee Roaster while only 12 declare Distributor of Coffee Related Products. Those are treated as two different kinds of business, and only eight members of the whole directory claim both. Ninety-three of the 174 declare exactly one type. One roaster in Santa Fe Springs declares seven at once: roaster, cold brew and ready to drink, foodservice, hotel and hospitality, office coffee services, private label and retailer services. That single membership row is the whole argument in one line.

Two cautions about that directory before it is leaned on any harder. It is a paid membership list rather than a register, and it says so itself, inviting non-members to join. And its geography reflects who pays the subscription: New Jersey has more members than New York, which is interesting beside what our New York coffee roasters page found about the trade leaving the city, but is a fact about NCA membership and nothing more.

Our own list says the same thing from the other side. Almost every company below roasts its own coffee, and the ones that do not are not roasters who buy in, they are a different kind of business entirely: office coffee and vending operators, a Cleveland water company with a coffee line, a couple of merchants reselling roasted coffee and tea, and one multi-site cafe group. There is no meaningful population here of pure middlemen moving other people's roasted beans.

For a buyer the consequence is practical and slightly awkward. Changing supplier is not changing the logistics company while the product stays the same, which is roughly what it means in produce or dry goods. It means changing the product, because the roast profile belongs to the company that delivers it. That is why the rest of this page is about the things that make a supplier hard to leave rather than about who has the best truck.

The United States grows almost none of it, which is true of nothing else here

This directory's other categories all rest on a domestic supply chain. Meat is killed in Iowa and Nebraska, produce moves from California and Arizona, bread is baked in the metro it is sold in. Coffee has no American origin story at all, and USDA says so plainly.

The Economic Research Service, in a chart note by Kamron Daugherty and Alex Melton dated 26 September 2018, records that the United States produces a minimal amount of coffee, that the limited domestic production comes from Kona coffee grown in Hawaii, and that it represents less than 1 percent of US consumption. The same note counts 50 countries exporting coffee worth $1 million or more to the United States in 2017, with a further 54 exporting smaller amounts.

A more recent ERS note, by Constanza Valdes and Steven Zahniser dated 26 September 2024, puts the scale and the concentration together: the United States is the world's second leading importer of coffee, and in 2023 about 80 percent of US unroasted coffee imports came from Latin America, valued at $4.8 billion, principally from Brazil at 35 percent and Colombia at 27 percent. Historically more than 92 percent of US coffee imports have been Arabica.

So every company on this page is downstream of an import, whether or not it does the importing itself, and most do not: green importing is a separate trade whose customer is a roaster rather than a kitchen. When a supplier tells you a price has moved for reasons outside its control, coffee is the one category in this directory where that is structurally likely to be true.

It also means the questions worth asking a coffee supplier are different from the ones worth asking a produce house. Origin, on a bag of coffee, is a marketing claim and a sourcing claim at once, and the difference between a company that buys green on its own account and one that buys roasted from somebody else is not visible from the outside. Our Miami coffee importers page covers what that looks like in the metro closest to the trade.

Exchange-grade green sits in five US port districts, and three are metros here

There is a physical answer to where American coffee is, and it comes from the contract that prices it rather than from any government register.

ICE describes its Coffee C contract as the world benchmark for Arabica coffee, and says it prices physical delivery of exchange-grade green beans, from one of 20 countries of origin in a licensed warehouse, to one of several ports in the US and Europe, with stated premiums and discounts for ports and growths. The delivery points it names are exchange-licensed warehouses in the Ports of New York District, Virginia, New Orleans, Houston, Miami, Bremen and Hamburg, Antwerp and Barcelona. New York and Virginia are par; New Orleans, Miami and Houston carry a discount of half a cent per pound.

Three of those five American delivery points are metros this directory already covers. The contract itself is 37,500 pounds, symbol KC, physically settled, trading March, May, July, September and December, with a minimum fluctuation of five hundredths of a cent per pound, which works out at $18.75 a contract, and no daily price limit. Brazil is deliverable at a 600 point discount and Vietnam becomes deliverable from the May 2027 expiry.

None of that makes a New York or Miami roaster cheaper, and it would be wrong to read it that way. What it means is that the warehousing infrastructure for the raw material sits in a handful of places, and that the exchange has priced the difference between them explicitly rather than leaving it to freight. It is also a reminder of how old this arrangement is in one of those cities: the Coffee Exchange of the City of New York opened in 1882 and its descendant became part of ICE in January 2007.

For the rest of the country the green still arrives through one of those districts and moves inland, which is why a roaster's location tells you very little about its supply. Our Cleveland coffee roasters sit nowhere near a port and buy from the same origins as everybody else.

MetroVerifiedDeliverShip outWalk inPublish a year
New YorkNY276251312
BaltimoreMD18181127
MiamiFL17101228
ChicagoIL15151447
ClevelandOH1311906
OrlandoFL127753
Los AngelesCA88851

Counts of the coffee suppliers we have verified in each metro, from what each company publishes about itself. They are not a count of the companies trading there, and a metro with more rows has been researched longer rather than being better supplied.

Two prices are published every day, one in New York and one in London

A coffee buyer has something a produce buyer in most cities does not: a public daily reference for the raw material. There are two of them and they measure different things.

The first is the C price, the front-month Coffee C future on ICE, quoted in US cents per pound. It is the number a roaster means when it says the market moved. The second is the International Coffee Organization's composite indicator price, the I-CIP, which the ICO describes as one of the key reference prices of the coffee industry in the world, established in the 1960s and published daily by 10am GMT from its offices on Gray's Inn Road in London. The ICO splits it into four groups, which is the part worth knowing, because those groups move differently.

Reading the ICO series we captured on 23 September 2026 gives the shape of that. On 22 September 2026 the composite indicator stood at 248.44 US cents per pound, while Colombian Milds were 338.93, Other Milds 313.03, Brazilian Naturals 271.24 and Robustas 160.96. Over that month to date the composite averaged 264.48, with a high of 279.85 on 1 September and a low of 248.44 on the 22nd. A supplier quoting a washed Colombian and a supplier quoting a Robusta blend are exposed to two numbers that were more than 170 cents apart on the same day.

The recent past put that to the test. Executive Order 14323 of 30 July 2025 imposed an additional ad valorem duty of 40 percent on articles of Brazil. Executive Order 14361 of 20 November 2025, published in the Federal Register on 26 November, provided that certain agricultural products would not be subject to that duty, effective for goods entered on or after 13 November 2025, with refunds through CBP. The order's own text does not name coffee: the commodity list sits in an annex that renders as images. Reuters reported the same day that the removal covered Brazilian food products including beef, coffee, cocoa and fruits, and noted that Brazil normally supplies about a third of the coffee used in the United States. Trade press put the combined rate at 50 percent while it applied, counting the 10 percent baseline.

What that does to an invoice has actually been measured, though the study is old enough to say so. ERS report ERR-38, Cost Pass-Through in the US Coffee Industry, by Leibtag, Nakamura, Nakamura and Zerom, dated 13 March 2007, found that on average a 10 cent increase in the cost of a pound of green coffee in a quarter results in a 2 cent increase in manufacturer and retail prices in that quarter, and that if the cost change persists over several quarters it is incorporated into manufacturer prices approximately cent for cent. Read that as the reason a roaster's price lags the market in both directions, and as the reason some of them have moved to quoting monthly.

What makes a coffee supplier hard to leave is rarely the coffee

The espresso machine on the bar, the grinder beside it, the person who dials them in and the engineer who comes when the group head fails are frequently all supplied by the company that sells the beans. That bundle is the switching cost in this trade, and it is the reason the column on the list above exists.

61 of the 110 companies here say in their own copy that they sell something beyond the coffee: equipment, staff training, program consulting, or some combination. The remaining 49 describe beans and nothing else. That split is not evenly spread, and the spread is the thing only a page covering several metros can see. It runs from about half the rows in Miami to seven of the eight we have verified in Los Angeles.

The arrangements behind those words vary more than the words do. Some companies sell the machine outright. Some place it and service it for as long as you buy the coffee, which is the model an office coffee operator runs on and is closer to a lease than a sale. Some only dial in equipment you already own, and some only advise on what to buy. Those are four different commercial relationships and they are not distinguishable from a category tag, which is why each row here links through to its full listing rather than trying to say it in a line.

The practical question to ask is not whether a supplier offers equipment. It is what happens to the equipment if you change supplier. A machine you own is a machine you keep. A machine placed against a coffee contract is a machine that leaves with the contract, and an operator who has not asked which one they have finds out at the worst possible moment.

The training half is worth separating out too, because it is the part that survives a change of supplier. A member of staff who has been taught to dial in a grinder has that skill afterwards. Our Los Angeles coffee roasters sit at the top of this measure in our own data, and their listings describe the training in more detail than most.

The same trade answers the phone differently in each of these 7 metros

Put seven metros side by side and the differences are not about the coffee. They are about how each city's trade expects to be approached, and they are sharp enough to change how you open an account.

Email is the widest of them. Reading the rows on this page in September 2026, four in five Chicago suppliers publish an email address and fewer than one in five Baltimore suppliers do. That is not a difference in how modern the companies are, since Baltimore's trade includes several of the oldest businesses on this page: it is a difference in whether a trade expects a first contact in writing or on the telephone. Approach a Baltimore roaster by email and you may simply not hear back.

The walk-in counter runs the other way and is starker still. Not one Cleveland supplier on this page offers one, while five of the eight in Los Angeles do. A counter matters more than it sounds: it is how a small account buys ten pounds this week without a delivery minimum, and how a new buyer tastes before committing. In a city without one, the sample and the cupping do that job, and several of these companies say so explicitly.

Age is the third, and it is the one that most changes what you should expect from a conversation. Among the companies that publish a founding year, the Baltimore median sits in the 1930s while every other metro's sits between 2005 and 2012. Two cautions travel with that: only a minority of rows publish a year at all, so this is a median over the companies that chose to tell us, and Los Angeles has too few to have a median, so it is left out of the comparison rather than given a misleading one.

The oldest published dates on this page run from 1840 in Brooklyn through three Baltimore houses founded in 1895, 1900 and 1909, and a Cleveland water business from 1897 that now also runs an office coffee service. A trade that is a century old in one city and fifteen years old in another is not one trade with a shared set of conventions, and a buyer moving between metros should not assume the account will open the same way twice.

1

Ask whether the machine is sold or placed

Equipment supplied against a coffee contract usually leaves with the contract. Equipment you bought is yours. This is the single question that decides how expensive changing supplier will be.

2

Ask what the price is indexed to, and how often it moves

The C price and the ICO indicator are both public and daily. A supplier that reprices quarterly and one that reprices monthly are making different promises, and neither is wrong.

3

Separate the training from the beans

Staff training is the part of the bundle you keep. Where a supplier offers it, take it early rather than at renewal.

4

Check how this city expects to be contacted

In some of these metros most suppliers publish an email address and in others hardly any do. A call gets answered where an email will not.

Unfiltered

What operators say about buying coffee wholesale

24 comments quoted verbatim from public threads, gathered for this page from national trade forums rather than reused from a city page.

r/Coffee23 points
As prior poster said, check your state and city regulations for a home food based business. I had a Cafe-roastery and decided to close the Cafe after covid and just roast. I had a disagreement with my landlord and decided to move. Thought I'd be able to buy a new home in my state further away from the city and roast in the garage. Turns out no can do in just about every town in my state due to zoning. Spent the last year looking for a home in adjacent, more rural states with less strict zoning regulations, with lots of acreage so as not to annoy adjacent neighbors with smoke and odor. There will be plenty of that, even with an exhaust treatment system. Finally will be closing on a new place in a few weeks! But even for a tiny roaster like me, the renovation of the garage to turn it into a small roastery is a daunting project. My roastery will have to pass the same Health Dept inspection that a restaurant is supposed to pass. I don't expect to be up and running until after January. So buckle up if you really want to do this. It will be far more expensive than you realize.
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r/Coffee28 points
Roasting and Cafe operations are different animals. Sure, you can do it, but something will be sacrificed from the other. Personally, I love the roasting side...sure I sell bagged coffee under our brand, but I have no desire to open a full Cafe. I only sell brewed coffee (in a few forms) to attract people to buy my bags. I basically give away free coffee, get them to taste what I make...and get them to buy what I bag, and keep them coming back month after month. Your roasting partner should be giving you a good deal where you can make your own profit and promote your shop...because the more you sell the more you need to order from the roaster...
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r/smallbusiness19 points
Not a shop owner, but just offering my take on this: consider keeping the roasting business separate from the coffee shop business. Because that's what these are, they're separate businesses with very different business models and thinking about each separately will be easiest to determine if the investment is sound (even though they'd have a lot of synergies together). If the roasting step is the biggest cost cut you can make and you can keep the product otherwise unchanged, this may be a good idea. Just keep in mind it may take you away from your core business model. Hope someone can add the numbers you need!
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r/Coffee23 points
As a coffee shop owner, I would suggest there was a change in equipment, procedure, or staff before I would suspect a change in bean quality. Just send a message to the shop with your concern. The owner might not be hands-on enough to catch the change (such is the case with franchises).
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r/Coffee43 points
ya thats true. But with my small roaster I can roast minimum 20 pounds, and thats being pretty liberal, in a hour. I do that for 12 hours a week. So that's 240lbs of roasted coffee a week. If its my costa then I am paying like 2.50 a lb but from the roaster down the street that same bean is 11 a lb. I am saving 1800 $ a week. My roaster was 6k so I made that back in 4 weeks roasting my own. They for sure dont "roast" themselves but the incentive is pretty high to roast your own imo.
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r/Chefit15 points
Asking your distributor what food you should serve signals a lack of business acumen. You should know what you want to serve and ask the rep what they have available to achieve that goal. Your business model is too vague and that’s why you’re getting questioned about your ability to execute it. I’ll happily eat a roller grill taquito with my gas station coffee but if you’re offering top of the line coffe drinks your food menu needs to be on par with that.
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Pulled from 298 threads and 3,758 comments across r/Coffee, r/roasting, r/coffee_roasters, r/coffeeshopowners, r/smallbusiness, r/barista and r/Chefit, collected in September 2026 and quoted unedited. This is the one corpus here weighted toward the SELLING side, and that is the subject rather than an accident: on this page the roaster is the supplier, so a roaster explaining its own margins is the trade describing itself. Three of the research's picks were swapped for carrying an emoji or profanity in a body that may never be edited. Its own corpus: no comment here appears on any other page of this site. Comments are unedited and link back to the original thread. They are individual experiences, not evidence about any distributor in general, and we deliberately do not aggregate them into a score.

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Questions

Coffee distributors: common questions

What does a coffee distributor actually do?

Usually it roasts. In most food categories a distributor buys finished product and moves it, but in coffee the company selling to your kitchen is normally the roaster itself, taking green coffee, roasting it to its own profiles, and delivering or shipping it to trade accounts. A minority are service businesses instead, principally office coffee and vending operators who place and maintain brewing equipment and restock it. Both are on this page, and each row says which by what it sells beyond the beans.

Should I buy from a roaster or from a distributor?

In this trade that is usually not a choice between two suppliers, because they are the same company. The real choice is between a roaster that sells direct, an office coffee service that bundles the machine and the restocking, and a broadline distributor that carries coffee among thousands of other lines. The first gives you the most control over the product, the second the least work, and the third the convenience of one invoice. Which of those you want depends on how much the coffee itself matters to what you sell.

Where does coffee sold in the United States come from?

Essentially all of it is imported. USDA's Economic Research Service records that domestic production is minimal, limited to Kona coffee grown in Hawaii, and represents less than 1 percent of US consumption. ERS also reports that the United States is the world's second largest coffee importer and that in 2023 about 80 percent of unroasted imports came from Latin America, principally Brazil at 35 percent and Colombia at 27 percent. More than 92 percent of US imports have historically been Arabica.

What is the C price, and should I be tracking it?

The C price is the front-month Coffee C futures contract on ICE, quoted in US cents per pound, and it is the benchmark for Arabica. It is worth knowing rather than watching: it tells you whether your supplier's next increase reflects the market or something else. Be aware it prices one grade. The International Coffee Organization publishes a separate daily composite indicator split into four groups, and on 22 September 2026 those groups ranged from about 161 cents for Robustas to about 339 for Colombian Milds, so a blend's exposure depends entirely on what is in it.

Why did coffee prices rise so much in 2025?

Two things at once, one of them policy. Executive Order 14323 of 30 July 2025 put an additional 40 percent duty on articles of Brazil, which normally supplies about a third of the coffee used in the United States, and with the 10 percent baseline the trade press put the combined rate at 50 percent. Executive Order 14361 of 20 November 2025 then exempted certain agricultural products, effective for goods entered on or after 13 November 2025 and with refunds available through CBP; that order's own text does not list the commodities, and Reuters reported coffee among them. Weather-driven production shortfalls were happening over the same period, so the two causes are not separable from the price alone.

How quickly does a change in the green price reach my invoice?

More slowly than the market moves, and USDA has measured it. ERS report ERR-38, published in March 2007, found that on average a 10 cent rise in the cost of a pound of green coffee in a quarter produced about a 2 cent rise in manufacturer and retail prices in that quarter, and that a cost change persisting over several quarters is passed through roughly cent for cent. The study is old and should be treated as one, but it explains why a roaster's price lags in both directions, and why some now quote monthly instead.

Do wholesale roasters supply espresso machines?

Many do, and the arrangement matters more than the offer. Across the companies on this page, a majority say in their own copy that they sell something beyond the coffee, most commonly equipment, staff training or program consulting. But selling a machine, placing one against a coffee contract, servicing one you already own and advising on which to buy are four different relationships. Ask specifically what happens to the equipment if you change supplier, because a placed machine normally leaves with the contract.

How many coffee distributors are there in the United States?

There is no register to count, because there is no federal license for selling coffee. The National Coffee Association's business directory is a paid membership list of 174 companies rather than a census, and 62 of those declare themselves roasters. This page lists 110 suppliers verified from their own published sources across 7 metros, which is a documented subset and not an estimate of the trade.